The Royal End

The Royal End depicts a ceremonial or festive scene among Tahitian figures, painted in 1892 and now at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. The title suggests Gauguin was interested not only in everyday life but in the hierarchical and ceremonial structures of Polynesian society — structures that had been substantially disrupted by French colonialism by the time he arrived. His vision of Polynesian ceremonial life was partly reconstructed from ethnographic reading and earlier images rather than direct observation of surviving practices. The Getty acquired this as part of its broad holding of nineteenth-century European painting.

Gauguin solves collective figure scenes through a horizontal frieze arrangement in which figures are differentiated by colour and pose rather than spatial position. The overall colour temperature is warm and festive, deep oranges and reds set against cooler background blues.